From the blog

I set a goal in the beginning of July to try to post to the blog twice a week.

Hah.

Well, here I am after a whirlwind of cross country trips. Back to NJ, drive to CA, fly to WI, fly back from WI, fly to NV, fly back from NV, drive around CA some more… it was a crazy month and a half. But! My sister now lives in CA, at least for the next ten months, so I have a cross stitching buddy! I also had plenty of time to stitch, and am onto the backstitching!

Only, I have found a mistake and it bugs me so much, I may need to frog a bit and fix it.

I know.

I’ve also been trying to focus some on making headway on writing fiction. I’ll admit this currently has priority over StashCache, although I continue to monitor for bugs and still have a huge list of features I would like to implement eventually! The reality is, however, that StashCache doesn’t make any contributions to the family finances, and our hope is that the writing will. In return, however, I can offer the news that there are several new stash building files available for download, including Kreinik, Gloriana, Needlepoint Silks, and Dinky Dyes! Check them out over on the imports page.

Hopefully now that the travel chaos has somewhat settled down, I can start to make some progress on some other things. Fingers crossed!

Apologies in advance because this will probably veer into Android gibberish for most of you, but I’m hoping writing it down will help make sense of it. At least some of it.

It turns out that Samsung’s default file manager, as included in their phones, doesn’t respond (or at least didn’t in the past, which matters when you are supporting phones beyond just the current top of the line) to the ACTION_GET_CONTENT intent. Head, meet desk. Some time this evening with my favorite search engine and iterating on terms turned up something that I think will be useful when writing a solution that fits the program, but I am very grateful to the user who let me know about this issue. That’s the kind of thing that is pretty much impossible for me to find on my own, because it relies on having the Samsung special apps (and only theirs, no other apps that can handle it on the phone) installed, and my only Samsung device in the past 5+ years has been the Galaxy Nexus.

Which is plugged in and charging so I can stick the app on it to hopefully try and reproduce a different bug which has been reported, where I really have no idea what might be going on. I don’t know why the spinner menu wouldn’t let someone switch back to the stash list after selecting the master list, but if there is someone out there who is reading this and has experienced this bug (and hasn’t contacted me about it), please let me know. Helpful information would include: your phone or tablet model, the operating system you are using (Android 4.1? 4.2?).

Extra bonus helpful information includes answers to the following questions:

What happens when you try to switch to the shopping list instead of back to the stash?

When it won’t switch, does the text in the spinner change?

Does the problem persist when you rotate your device from portrait to landscape (or vice versa)?

An extra-special thanks to the user who reported this – even when the e-mail has a bug report, hearing from anyone using my app always makes me want to skip around the house singing “somebody likes it” at the top of my lungs. Pretty much the only reward I get for this is the feedback from folks using it, so it makes my day when it happens. 🙂

Well, my plan to release the major update this week hit some major bumps in the road. A lot of them are related to features that seem really straightforward but aren’t. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up!

But… it does mean that the update is going to take longer, and may happen in smaller chunks. Especially because I want to be sure that I am around and able to fix any bugs that might slip through in an update in a timely fashion, and there’s a chunk of travel coming up. (One of my sisters will be living in the same state as me again! Hooray!)

Also, as much as I love the app and stitching and whatnot, they don’t pay the bills. I have to take some time out to explore some other possibilities that might result in a paycheck. My Other Half has been incredibly patient and supportive through all of this, but I don’t want to wear that patience out.

So rest assured, my app users, updates will be forthcoming! But it may take some time. In the meantime, I’m doing my best to monitor for crashes (Google still doesn’t e-mail me about them, so the best way to bring something to my attention is through e-mail!) and get fixes out for those quickly. I’m always happy to hear from you!